Just kidding about the leftist heart thing. But they did cool a cubic meter of copper down to almost absolute zero, to a point that qualifies as the coldest thing ever in the history of the planet.
Supposedly the point of doing this is to use the freezing process to detect neutrinos in an effort to learn about anti-matter or something.
I have always found the whole "absolute zero" topic to be very interesting because, like the speed of light, it is one of those things that we aren't supposed to be able to do. That is, it is unachievable according to everything that we currently understand about matter and physics. Also, as a young person I remember reading a science fiction book wherein somehow some scientists are able to freeze an object to absolute zero and when they do it opens a portal to other dimensions and then drama happened. Total BS, of course, but it captured my imagination when I was perhaps eleven years old.
A chunk of copper became the coldest cubic meter (35.3 cubic feet) on Earth when researchers chilled it to 6 millikelvins, or six-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (0 Kelvin).
This is the closest a substance of this mass and volume has ever come to absolute zero. Researchers put the 880-lb. (400 kilograms) copper cube inside a container called a cryostat that is specially designed to keep items extremely cold. This is the first cryostat built that is capable of keeping substances so close to absolute zero.
"The main difficulty of this project was the technological challenge of the cryostat," Carlo Bucci, a researcher at the Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy who helped build the cryostat, told Live Science. "We spent 10 years designing, realizing and testing the system." [The 8 Coldest Places on Earth]
Building the extreme temperature cryostat is just the first step in a new experiment in which the cryostat will act as a particle detector. The setup for the experiment is called Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) and is being built at the INFN Gran Sasso underground lab. Bucci and a team of researchers hope the CUORE detector will reveal more about the subatomic particles called neutrinos and why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.
LINKThe comments that follow the article immediately pick up on the fact that there is a huge discrepancy between the volume of the copper and its weight...can't get away with sloppy science reporting unless it involves the climate, you know.